It’s hiring season in the international school world, and going through the hiring process in 2024 has been eye-opening for me. This is the first time I’ve looked through applications since ChatGPT (and other AI text generators) changed the way people write – or…”write”.
Here’s the thing. When I have a long list of applications to look over, it becomes tedious to read the same thing over and over. And that’s what you get when a hundred people ask the same bot to answer the same questions using the same keywords, which are lifted from either the job description or the latest trends in international education. And even though I have only toyed with AI a handful of times, it was really easy to see that many of the applications I read were highly AI-generated. The point of a cover letter is to show me who you are as a person and an educator, and you need your own voice to do that. Give me a lens into what you actually do in your classroom, what you actually believe at your core about education. Applicants that wrote from the heart, and from strong beliefs, were the ones who stood out to me; those are the candidates that will move to the next step.
The fact of the matter is that if you ask AI to say that you are exactly what the job description states, and that’s *not* who you are, you are probably going to be unhappy in that job anyway. Why would you want that for yourself?